


The Dream Machine

by tehtarik



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Other, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Valkyrie-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 04:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13356237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: Before she can take her first mouthful, however, the doors of the storage bay slide open. Valkyrie freezes.In the dimly lit cargo bay, the two people standing at the doorway are reduced to silhouettes. One of them is leaning against the other, in the posture of the severely injured.“Get help! Quick!” says the larger of the two figures, who of course, is none other than the God of Thunder himself, Thor Odinson, King of Asgard. “My brother is dying! Get help!”Next thing she knows, she's flat on her back, pinned down by the weight of Loki’s body.For some reason--Valkyrie will never be able to fathom the reasoning of gods, and much less, the reasoning of siblings, Thor had just chucked his brother at her.----OR: in which Valkyrie muses on a variety of matters, from idiot brothers to the strangeness of belonging anywhere at all.





	The Dream Machine

**Author's Note:**

> So this is kind of a random one that I wrote this last year but never got down to putting it up until now. I've written based only on info from Thor: Raganarok (I can't remember what went on in the first two Thor movies), and the associated wikia, so apologies if I make any errors - let me know.

The Statesman is definitely not big enough for the entire population of Asgard.

Ever since the entire planet went up in flames, resulting in almost every inhabitant jumping aboard the Statesman to escape, there’s been the constant threat of people trying to get familiar with Valkyrie in non-hostile, genuinely cordial and extremely bewildering ways. Trying to count her as one of their own.

Treating her as though she’s a long lost cultural relic, a living reminder of Asgard, a place which no longer exists.

It’s enough to make her miss her old scrapper ship in Sakaar, that spluttering piece of shit with all the trash spare parts she’d paid one of the roving mechanics to integrate into its hacked systems. At least she flew alone in it.

There are hologram projectors in nearly every room of the Statesman, and they display recorded holographic performances of various Sakaaran bands decked out in sparkle-crusted extra-reflective leathers, spinning the dials of sleek, blocky console-like instruments. The music is the usual electric staccato, the Grandmaster’s favourite. Notes sounding like they’re spat out of steel pipes.Two hours later, the recordings finish; the entire entertainment programme of the ship loops back on itself, and the replays begin without mercy.

Things get better for Valkyrie (or so it seems) when she discovers a door at the end of a passageway near the storage bay. The door is sealed and she has no idea what the access code is, but there’s a crowd of people heading this way and that’s enough to make her put her elbow through the keypad. The mechanism sizzles and hawks out sparks, but the doors unlock. She pries them open and steps into a narrow room, stacked ceiling to floor with bottles and flasks of various sizes.

She almost laughs. She pats the doorframe. Maybe she can get along with this crazy Statesman ship, after all.

Valkyrie picks a large flask of a shelf, slams the doors shut behind her, makes her way down a garishly-lit corridor, avoiding the communal areas. She ends up in the storage bay.

It’s a lot quieter here, probably the quietest place in the whole ship because there’s nothing of value in here, and it serves as a good place to have a drink.

When she unstoppers the flask, the scent of the liquor is a blunt punch to her nostrils. A promise of potency, and not much else. Flavourless strength. Good enough for her.

Before she can take her first mouthful, however, the doors of the storage bay slide open. Valkyrie freezes.

In the dimly lit cargo bay, the two people standing at the doorway are reduced to silhouettes. One of them is leaning against the other, in the posture of the severely injured.

“Get help! Quick!” says the larger of the two figures, who of course, is none other than the God of Thunder himself, Thor Odinson, King of Asgard. “My brother is dying! Get help!”

Next thing she knows, she's flat on her back, pinned down by the weight of Loki’s body.

For some reason--Valkyrie will never be able to fathom the reasoning of gods, and much less, the reasoning of siblings, Thor had just chucked his brother at her.

Her ribs ache. The back of Loki's scalp had slammed against her mouth, and the residual impact is still vibrating through her jawbone. She spits out a mouthful of his hair.

“Oh, I don't know.” She shoves Loki off her and gets to her feet. Jabs a toe at the knee of Thor’s dishevelled brother, still on the ground. “Isn't this a bit humiliating for him?”

The God Of Mischief’s expression is, for lack of a better word, thunderous. A little battered, mostly in the ego department, but nowhere close to death, as far as she can tell.

Thor, on the other hand, is laughing. His laughter is enormous and gusty. Somehow, she gets the feeling that she’s supposed to laugh in the same way as he does. He reaches down to ruffle Loki’s hair, and not bother to help him up.

“Come on. That was funny. Wasn't it funny? Why am I the only one laughing?”

“Because it wasn't funny,” says Valkyrie.

“You could acknowledge me, at the very least.” Loki dusts himself off. There are knives in his smile, a trace of danger he’s obviously trying to affect. Reminds her of the twin daggers he so wantonly flips, only for her to bring him to his knees with a hard left hook to the chin.

“So this is where you’ve been all week,” says Thor. He extends a hand, generous, open-palmed, to Valkyrie. “You saved Asgard. And people who did what you did shouldn’t have to sit in storage.”

“Thanks for the offer. But no. I’d rather--,” she stops. Spins around, searching.

“Old habits,” says Loki, smoothly, “are easy to read.”

The flask with the drink is hovering above his palm, turning a slow circle.

“Right, that’s enough.” Valkyrie lunges forward and seizes the flask away from him. She turns a withering glare at both brothers, leaders of Asgard, a stateless population of nomads and drifters. Which makes Thor Odinson the lord of drifters, and his brother--whatever his brother is supposed to be. “Don’t you both have things to do? Like fly the ship? Or deliver rousing speeches to the people? Rebuild their hopes and dreams or something?”

“We haven’t seen you for a week. We were just looking--,” Thor starts to protest, but she ignores him.

The weight of the flask is different in her hand. Wrong. When she turns it upside down, sand pours out, fine silky sand, forming a small mound at her feet. And when the sand runs out, something else: the quivering forked tongue of a snake, followed by its flat head with an eye ringed in orange, and then the rest of its sinuous, brown-scaled body. It drops to the ground beside her, raises its head and stares at her with its ugly orange eye. She lifts her foot to stomp on its head.

Thor lets out a strangled cry and shoves her away.

“She’s helpless! How could you!” He sounds so indignant and so wounded. Surely an act, another one of his incomprehensible games with his brother. But instead, he picks up the snake from the ground, and strokes its head. Its tongue flicks at his fingers, the rest of its body coiling around his forearm. “She’ll be right. You’ll be right, won’t you?”

He glares at Valkyrie, but she’s got more important things on mind. Specifically, the drink. Where did the drink go?

“Oh. My apologies,” says Loki, unapologetically.

 

* * *

 

Before Thor-son-of-Odin, God-of-Thunder, Prince-of-Asgard and other et ceteras came hurtling down one of the many assholes of the cosmos, and into the cesspit of Sakaar, Valkyrie had not seen another Asgardian for centuries. Millennia, perhaps. She still isn’t sure how time functioned in Sakaar.

In fact, before her exile on Sakaar, the last Asgardian Valkyrie had laid eyes on was Hela herself.

She was still Brunnhilde back then, Brunnhilde with the silver stallion, leader of Asgard’s winged cavalry. And Asgard was still a gilded city, the thrumming heart of the Nine Realms, light of Yggdrasil’s grid. The Valkyrior rode at her command. And among her winged fleet, her second-in-command Sigrid, was the most petulantly competitive subordinate of hers.

Sigrid took every chance to spar with her, though almost always, Brunnhilde won. Sigrid spent most of her life trying to dethrone Brunnhilde, and it amused Brunnhilde for quite a bit. Until they both got tired of skipping around each other and clashing swords. Sigrid cornered her in the armoury one day, and Brunnhilde fought back, and at one point they managed to disarm each other, and then they were kissing fiercely, tumbling through racks of spears and swords and shields, nearly impaling themselves.

There were many afternoons spent like that: languid hours of serenading each other, banqueting with the other Asgardian elite in Odin’s halls, tussling in the marble baths of their shared rooms.

“I think I won after all,” Sigrid told her.

“I think you did,” Brunnhilde agreed. “But only because I let you.”

And that was Asgard back in those days. Simple pleasures. Peace. At least until Odin sent her and her troops through a rift in Yggdrasil, to the breach in Hel. Before that day, she’d never even heard of Hela.

Hela’s prison was a nowhere place, sealed beyond the reach of time, beyond any of the pathways of Yggdrasil. Hela had moulded it to her taste, refashioned the prison into a jagged environment of sheer cliffs rising out of nowhere, masses of razor-sharp stalagmites wreathed in fog, like a continuous wave of lances poised to fly.

Hela hacked through Brunnhilde’s soldiers with ease, her necroswords scissoring through the flesh and bone of the Valkyrior troops, and soon Brunnhilde found herself locked sword-to-sword with Odin’s firstborn.

“You know,” said Hela, “I could use a soldier like you. I need an army.”

“Thanks, but that sounds like a demotion to me.”

“What a pity,” Hela said. And in a tone that was rather childish: “I feel so misunderstood sometimes. Do you know why you’ve never heard of me?”

“Yes,” said Brunnhilde mockingly. “Didn’t you fail somewhere along the way? You stood against Asgard and lost.”

The corners of Hela’s mouth were tugged upwards, her lips flattening into a slow smile. “Told you I was misunderstood. So that’s the lie the All Father, _my father_ , fed all of you?”

With a great thrust of strength, Hela broke the deadlock of swords, knocked Brunnhilde to the ground and slashed through her armour. She felt a broad stripe of pain break open across her chest and torso. Valkyrie remembers. She remembers the vague scream that didn’t come from her mouth, but from somewhere behind her. A familiar voice. Sigrid’s. The next blow from Hela did not land on Brunnhilde. The next spear went whistling out of the flesh of Hela’s wrist, grazing past Brunnhilde’s ear, to bury itself into Sigrid’s back and emerge through her chest.

  
Valkyrie can map out that moment in her memory. Clearly, far too clearly. She can draw a straight fucking line, and at one end of the line, is Brunnhilde. And at the other end, Hela. And between, dangling and skewered by the line itself, is Sigrid. What was Sigrid doing there at the wrong place? Who knows. Something stupid like trying to run after Brunnhilde, maybe even save her. She should have known that Brunnhilde never needed saving.

Sigrid, bright as a gem in the darkness of Hela’s prison. Slack-jawed, wide-eyed, almost innocent looking. Sigrid, anything but innocent.

  
Her eyes became blank, recognition seeping out into space, or perhaps it was the void diffusing into her, turning her inside out. In Sigrid’s dying eyes, Brunnhilde glimpsed tiny ticks of familiar expressions, moments. And for some reason she was struck by the random memory of cliffs. The cliffs outside the city of Asgard, which they used to scale together. Sigrid’s taut calves racing above her, foothold to foothold, uprooting shrubs as she went and chucking them down below, trying to knock Brunnhilde off. Slow her down. At the top of the cliffs were the meadows where they both tangled together, in a half-exhausted heap of sweat-slicked limbs and kisses. The scent of skin. The dry prickle of thistles.

In the midst of her disbelief, Brunnhilde felt it: the sudden surge of Odin’s power. Before she'd even finished watching Sigrid die, Odin had sealed Hela back in her prison, his very life the charmed bolts that kept her locked in.

  
And in the process, Brunhilde was thrown out into the vast, gaping cosmos. It took her a second to realise that she had been nothing more than a distraction. Odin had sacrificed her and the entirety of the Valkyrior without a thought.

  
She fell through strange pathways, far away from the Nine Realms, hurtling through nothing, until she got sucked into the gravitational pull of the place of lost things and doorways to nowhere.

  
Next thing she knew, she was being shat out of the Devil's Anus, into the trash piles of Sakaar.

 

* * *

 

Onboard the Statesman, daytime or night, Valkyrie doesn’t know. Maybe it’s different for everyone. Maybe her own circadian rhythms are still messed up from Sakaar’s temporal reality. She’s still not able to synchronise with everyone else’s sleep cycles.

  
The heavy drinking -- an inevitable consequence of discovering the booze room -- hasn’t helped.

Her face is so close to the windows of the Observation Deck, the tip of her nose smudging a point where flesh comes into contact with the cold glass. Beyond the glass, the galaxy passes by, amiable, disrupted in many places by the white pinholes of stars, the smears of cosmic dust.

There is the sound of footsteps behind her. A dense tread, but there’s no hostility in the approach, so she does nothing and pretends not to hear. A hand taps her shoulder. It’s a heavy touch.

“Hey man.” It’s that Kronan walking cairn, Korg. “I heard about you. 142? From Sakaar? We never got the chance to say hello. So hello. I’m Korg, by the way. In case nobody ever told you who I am.”

“I remember you.” She flicks a brief smile somewhere up toward the ceiling, in the direction of Korg’s face. He’s so tall that it gives her a headache. “You defeated almost all the contenders I sold to Gast. Cost me a load of units as well.”

Korg looks genuinely remorseful. “Sorry about that, eh? It was either that -- or be Doug. Oh, and I had to fight all of Miek’s matches for ages because he got the flu. He’s always getting the flu, poor Miek. Mean blade, by the way.”

He gestures at the sword slung across her back. The blade needs oiling. She hasn’t bothered. There’s a good chance they’re safe on this ship and that there’s no need to carry a sword wherever she goes. But something about old habits. Said the troublesome God of Mischief. She's easy to read, but she’s never tried hard to be cryptic, anyway.

“You should’ve seen the ones me and my girls used to wield the first time we went up against Hela.” The words turn bitter in her mouth. The aftertaste of oversharing. “Well, you should've seen Hela’s. Hers cut ours to shards.”

“That's pretty stink.” Korg shakes his huge head. The sympathy is genuine. She can hear the lithic muscles of his neck grind. His physical presence is a noisy one, the sound of rockslides, loose scree shifting underfoot, slow geological plates in constant argument with each other. “Hey man, wanna see the Dream Machine?”

“I must have misheard that.”

Korg shrugs. “That’s what it’s been called anyway. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He shuffles out of the Observation Deck, ducking beneath the doorway but still catching the top of his forehead against the metal frame. The doorframe shivers. She follows without really wanting to. The Observation Deck is such a gloomy place, anyway. All that looking out into nothing. Nothing behind to tether them somewhere, everything ahead teetering on the edge of somebody’s whim.

  
Korg talks and talks as he goes. His speech is soft, inflected. Cheerful. She’s never heard anyone from Sakaar speak the way he does. Usually the idiots on Sakaar are conniving, opportunistic, surly. If someone’s nice to you, it’s because they’re trying to see if there’s anything you’ve got that they can lay their hands on.

“There was one time I thought I was going to be a Doug myself.” He lifts an absent-minded finger to scratch at the craggy plates of his neck. “I even made a will for Miek. Least I wrote it on the walls, told him he’d get my favourite sword and belt, but I reckon he’d let the blade go rusty. Miek can be a bit of a slob. Anyway, I always thought someone was going to off me in the ring one day. Life cycle of a Doug, you know?”

  
The room Korg leads her into is enormous. Like an amphitheatre of sorts with a cavernous ceiling. And right at the centre of that vast room:

“That’s the Dream Machine over there, bro. You see it?”

It’s hard to miss. The Dream Machine looks like a squat, capped tower, rising out of a bulbous pod with a glittering golden set of double doors. Lights flicker and race in pulsating rhythms along the frame of the doors, and right up the sides of the tower. It almost reminds her of one of the gambling dens of Sakaar. Except for one thing.

“Why,” says Valkyrie, “is it shaped like a giant dick? And even if it is so shaped, why are you calling it the Dream Machine?”

The words D R E A M M A C H I N E erupt into sparkling neon existence on a screen above the doors. The thousands of lights flare a garish orange and synthetic blue. From the top of the tower, spotlight beams erupt and sway into a lurid light show across the ceiling. An all-too-familiar hologram of Gast shivers to life before the doors, grinning, waggling his fingers. “Here we are -- at this -- this place where dreams come true!”

“Never mind.”

“Sorry ‘bout that.” Korg looks a little sheepish. “The Grandmaster did have some really weird taste.”

“Yeah, I know.” After all, she’s flown his Commodore ship with its pyrotechnic ejaculations in lieu of a functional weapons system. Makes for a stylish landing, though, you gotta admit. “He has a certain flair.”

  
She tilts her head upwards once more to look at the top of the Dream Machine tower, or the head of the Dick Pod, which is a far more suitable name. “So what exactly is it that you want to show me?”

  
“This way.”

Korg leads her right through the doors of the Dream Machine-slash-Dick Pod. Valkyrie steps into a room full of strobing lights. An orgy is taking place inside. A holographic orgy, pixelated glittery bodies thrashing and writhing and sweating and moaning. The soundtrack to all the illusory debauchery is the usual metallic synth rhythm favoured by Gast. Korg, unfazed walks through the holograms, toward a console and thumps on a bank of switches, and the Dick Pod goes dark.

  
No more orgies and weird indoor fireworks.

“That was almost an interesting experience,” Valkyrie says. “But nothing I don’t already know about Gast.”

“You can build your dreams into the machine. And the machine can project them so everyone present can immerse in them. Depending on how detailed they are,” Korg explains. “All that you just saw was the Grandmaster’s. His dreams are sort of the default. But heaps of others have come in since and started playing around, built their own dreams,and all. Lots of the people here come and have a go. It’s a good way to pass time, you know? Thought you’d want to give it a go.”

Valkyrie laughs. She’s never felt so disinclined to do something in her life.

  
“Nah. I’m predictable. My dreams are all just --,” she breaks off and mimes knocking back a shot, then fake-grimaces. “Cool appliance, though. Show me what the others have dreamed of.”

The holographic show comes to live all around them. The dreams of the others on board this ship, a phantasmagoria of jumbled narratives and half-lives. There are snapshots of places that look like farms or palaces. Skies as red as bonfires. Grand gleaming buildings, curved like hooks into space. Faceless people, in each other’s arms. Gradually, the connecting element between all these random images become obvious: Asgard. Everybody seems to be dreaming of Asgard, or having their dreams nestled within Asgard. Asgard come back to life, sculpted with the most careful of dream detail - arches, plazas, spires, the pillared walkways plunging into vertical vineyards growing on the sheer sides of cliffs, the fruit swollen and tangy. Banquet tables and feasts served upon gold platters, food bedecked in jewels. Dancing and music and starlit open-air ballrooms. Someone had even dreamed up the Bifrost Bridge, made it gleam brighter than ever.

  
But soon, everything becomes one dizzying whirl, indistinguishable, and it gives Valkyrie quite a headache. She feels hungover just being in the epicentre of everyone’s restless dreams.

“Alright, I get it,” she says. “Can we turn it off, now.”

“You are extremely _not_ fun to be with,” En Dwi Gast’s voice booms out of everywhere, petulant and on the edge of threat. The pod goes dark.

There’s only her and Korg left. He looks remorseful.

“What d’you reckon?” he says, without much hope.

“Did you make any dreams with this?”

“Oh yeah, I did.”

  
“Let’s see them. Yours only, though.”

The machine lights up on its own. Heat blossoms all around the pod. There’s sunshine, fields, the same cheery dreamscape that everyone dreams of. Except there’s a tank. Or something like a huge armoured vehicle, lumbering along, the tracks leaving deep ruts through the dirt.

“Conquest and war, huh?” Valkyrie is almost disappointed. “That's your dream? Glory of battle and whatever? Well, at least it’s different from the others.”

Korg looks injured. “Don't judge by appearances, bro.” He raps a fist against his chest. “This pile of rocks here’s got a heart.”

Out of the tank steps an identical image of Korg, a Dream-Korg, and he isn’t in his usual gladiatorial outfit. Instead, he’s wearing what looks like a pair of exceedingly short shorts. A sizable pair of shades sitting on his boulder head. Dream-Korg lifts a hand in greeting at her. The real Korg waves back. The side of the armoured tank begins to detach and lift upward like a huge flap.

Beneath the flap, the side of the tank has been modified into a huge grill spanning the length of the vehicle. Sausages are cooking on the grill. Dream-Korg turns over a few sausages with a pair of tongs. There’s a speaker system built into the side of the tank as well, belting out a lilting melody. The real Korg closes his eyes briefly and begins to sway to the rhythm. On the underside of the raised flap, and all along the body of the vehicle are old yellowing posters. Scraps of paper plastered onto the metal full og slogans.

_Join the Revolution? Legend!_ Or: _The Revolution is Over! Have a Sossie!_

“So that’s the dream,” says Korg. He sounds cheerful. The whole armoured tank-cum-food vending vehicle disappears along with Dream-Korg in his shades and shorts.

“Not bad,” Valkyrie says.

“That’s the plan when we get to this Earth place. Miek and me are looking to build our own little bach by a nice lake or something. Everything will be sweet as.”

“Sweet as--what?”

Korg shrugs. He ducks beneath the doorway of the Dick Pod. He doesn’t seem to understand. “Sweet as--nothing. Sweet as sweet. Sweet as, you know?”

“I get it.” says Valkyrie. She doesn’t get it. She thumps him on his massive forearm and immediately regrets it with all her throbbing knuckles.

 

* * *

 

Light is sharp enough to bite on Sakaar, pinging off the sprawling metallic scraplands, the gutted machines. Everything shines with the wrong kind of shine.

  
Brunnhilde was disoriented when she arrived at Sakaar, severed from the Nine Realms, raw from loss. The Valkyrior dead, their bodies cast into the void. Yngvildr. Edda. Astel. Tumbling from their steeds. Cut down by Hela.

  
And then there was Sigrid. The spearhead, a grisly blossom opening out of her ribs.

  
For awhile Sigrid kept dying behind Brunnhilde’s eyes. There was a chasm between their outstretched hands. And the sudden, thunderous wall of Odin’s power coming down between them, sealing them off from each other. Hela’s shriek of fury.

  
Living on Sakaar helped, though. It was easy to live on Sakaar, a landfill planet shaped by the continuous dumping of galactic garbage. There was no proper concept of time on Sakaar, because the Grandmaster had fucked it over well and truly – day and night were both irregular, and anyway, they didn’t mean day and night in the traditional sense either.

  
“Time here,” Gast told her when he’d newly discovered her sitting on a cache of weapons stolen from the other Sakaarans, in a burrow amid a jagged sky-high mountain of trash, “is a wholly reinvented thingy. Millions of years can fit snugly into a moment, and I can crush that moment in a compactor and break it into four or forty-four fragments and spread it around Sakaar, and that’s time for you.”

  
In his public holographic announcements, broadcasted across the whole planet, Gast called every single measurement of time “time”, without bothering to differentiate the length of anything. A day was the equivalent of an hour, a minute, a heartbeat, a year. For everyone in Sakaar, it was always _Sleep Time! Parade Time! Fight Time! Food Time! Show Time!_

  
It made sense for Brunnhilde to become a scrapper. Scrapper 142. It was a good thing. It was reductive and simple. Didn’t even have to bother with the baggage of having a name, and even better, no place of origin. Scrapper 142 came from the scrap and lived out of the scrap. She bullied the Sakaaran scavenging syndicates into fixing up a ship for her, syncing the weapons system to a pair of vambraces, which she kept fastened around her wrists. She blew her way through the roving gangs of trash pirates, picked up new castaways falling from the many portals, and sold them off to the Grandmaster.

  
Most of them ended up dead in Gast’s arena. Eh. As long as Gast kept pumping her with units for her next drink.

  
Roughhousing with the Hulk was one of the more entertaining things for Scrapper 142. She fought him with a playfulness that she’d long forgotten, not since Sigrid. She always ended up bruised, and once, even a dislocated arm when the Hulk threw her too hard against a wall. But it was fine. It was a good feeling. Real. The Hulk would always end each session by pinning her to the ground with one enormous fist, only using a tenth of the force he was capable of. Then he would sweep down and hoist her up so she sat on the plateau of his shoulder. He would go racing through the streets, the star of the countless parades and festivals hosted in his honour.

  
Other times were not so great. Once, she woke, snapped out of stupor – one minute, she was liquor-fogged, plastered but feeling almost pleasant, and the next, her heart was smashing out a pulse in her chest and against her windpipe, so it became tricky to breathe. There was a thirst so sharp that the insides of her throat must surely be fissuring apart, bleeding. And sticking out of the wall directly in front of her were three knives. The sheathes along her calves and waist empty. She didn’t even remember throwing them.  
She remembered Hela, though.

  
Hela, bending over her in her intoxication, crooning, “ _This_ is what you chose over joining me? I could have spared her, you know.”

  
“Fuck off,” 142 told her. The three knives in the wall were meant for Hela’s chest, but really, they would do shit to her. Hela, with her circus act of knives shooting from her wrists and fingers and the corners of her elbows. Every part of her that should be soft and pliable.

  
“ _I_ am Asgard,” Hela hissed. “Did my father never tell you that Asgard was forged from the heat of my sword, that I hammered its joints together, and sealed its foundations with my blood and sweat? Or do you all still worship his false image in the false light of home?”

  
“I come from Sakaar,” said Scrapper 142. In that moment, it was the truest thing she’d said. “You can take your Asgard and its sweaty joints and shove it right up your ass.”

  
Valkyrie remembers when the continuous loop-life of Sakaar ended for her. This was, of course, after Thor had crashed the party and upset Gast’s order.  
She stood on the scarlet and gold fuselage of the Commodore mid-flight and leapt off, landing on the back of one of Gast’s fighters, which had been pursuing them. She looked to her left and saw Thor on another vessel, and they stood parallel to each other for a minute or so. He smiled at her, his head cocked to the side (but he’d eased up on the swagger), more of an _I’m-here-to-help-so-lead-on_ kind of smile. She caught his smile and threw it back to him as a challenge, as they both stood braced against the onslaught of the wind, preparing to rip out fuel tanks with bare hands, or smash through cockpits with their skulls. Stupid, reckless things like that.

Time struck her hard in her chest, a stopped clock flickering back to life. Reset.

  
All of a sudden everything made sense. And the thing that made the most perfect sense ever, was agreeing to the madcap plan to shove herself right back up the Devil’s Anus, hurtling upwards in an absurd ship that had fireworks instead of guns.

 

* * *

 

From where she’s sitting, a narrow balcony on one of the upper floors of the Statesman, looking at the people passing below, Valkyrie can hear the Hulk’s non-threatening and self-satisfied gutturals. He appears to be having a conversation with some soul probably shivering in his pants.

  
The Hulk had said to her earlier in the day, “Val not happy.”

“I know where the booze room is,” she told him, “of course I’m happy.”

“Val and Hulk fight now,” Hulk said.

“If we fight, we’ll make a hole in the ship and everyone will be sucked out into space and will die.”

“But Val not happy!”

She managed to shrug him off, nip down to the liquor storage room, get herself a bottle of something potent, and so now here she is. The drink is all gone, of course, and it’s not nearly as strong as she wanted it to be.

From down below, the sound of familiar voices.

“...and you can be my adviser again, brother, just like old times,” Thor is saying as he ambles along, his gait aimless, his manner relaxed.

“I don’t recall a time when I was ever your adviser,” Loki answers coolly. Loki is stiff and upright next to Thor. Coldly conscious of his surroundings, affecting a careful air of disdain. Nothing like his brother, not even a shadow of him.

“Oh, not formally. But you advised me all the time. You advised me off the roof of the tallest spire on Asgard when I was seven, telling me that Father valued bravery more than anything else, and that the bravest thing I could do was to jump off. You advised me, at one time, to put on Father’s armour and challenge Heimdall to a fight to the death. Yes, you will certainly make an acceptable adviser, brother, if you could perhaps give me useful advice.”

“I recall that Heimdall swatted you down like a fly, seized you by your collar and dragged you all the way back to Father,” says Loki.

Valkyrie can almost hear Loki’s smirk from up here. These two will be an eternal mystery to her.

“The diorama of two brothers. Such a snug segment of our lives, isn’t it?”

She nearly jumps out of her skin.

Loki is beside her. Or perhaps, a projection of Loki, a mere sliver of his true self. Or perhaps the Loki down below, engaged in purposeless banter with Thor is the counterfeit. His presence (presences?) is a pain in the ass.

“So which of you is the real one?” She jabs a thumb down toward the Loki below, who’s following his brother through a doorway, leaving her line of sight.

“What does it matter?” Loki arches an eyebrow at her. “People place far too much significance in what they think is concrete.”

She studies his face, the different facets of his expression, shifting with each moment, the smugness at the corner of his mouth, the way skin rucks up at the edges of his eyes. Eyes as kind as thorns. She can’t quite pin him into place; his smile is ingenuine and kaleidoscopic. But he has softened somehow, since Sakaar. Just a tiny bit.

“New question,” she says, “what do you want?”

Loki hops onto the railing of the balcony and sits, facing her, leaning backward into nothing. But he doesn’t fall. So this is the false self, a splinter of his original consciousness.

“Who was she? The woman in your head?”

She wants to lash out at him, utter something vicious. But instead she says, “Her name was Sigrid. She was second in command of the Valkyrior.”

“Her fate was unfortunate.” His reply is far too smooth.

She has nothing in common with him. Their histories are different; he lived through eras of Asgard that she never saw because she was somewhere else. And he knew of nothing before his birth.

“You and Thor--,” she begins.

“--are putting up with each other for the time being,” Loki cuts her off. “Don’t be fooled by our banter.”

“Yeah sure. Like you’re not in love with him.”

“Excuse me?” Loki is incredulous.

“Oh, not _that_ kind of love,” she laughs. It feels great to take the piss. Almost as good as beating him in hand-to-hand combat. “Unless you want it to be, of course. I wouldn’t know. But I’ve seen you two. You’d do anything so that he doesn’t forget you. You’d rather be a fly on his eyeball than have your own life somewhere else, far away. You’d rather hate him, or pretend to hate him, than actually be free of him. You’re powerless over him and it’s not so bad.”

The mocking humour falters in Loki’s face. “Do you really want to play this game with me? I read your memories, remember? I know what you lost. Maybe closure isn’t what you want; maybe you think you don’t deserve it.”

Now Valkyrie jumps to her feet, prepared to knock him off the railing, if she can. “You touch me again, you get into my head again--,”

“I can’t touch you,” he says. His smile returns, slowly, spread across his face, self-satisfied. The God of Mischief does have a mischievous smile after all. “Not right now.”

Then he dissolves, glitches into the air like a flaw of existence. A sliver of expired time.

  
When she’s sure he’s gone, she whispers the name to herself. _Sigrid_. Exhales it out. It stings her mouth when she utters it. An answering pulse in her temples. This is the taste of an old wound.

 

* * *

 

  
Anyway, Asgard was a lie. The thought neither saddens nor infuriates her.

Those streets that she walked with Sigrid, those arches and spires, the gilded plazas and walkways bathed in honeyed light, a glittering eyrie upon mountains that sheared upwards, straight from the depths of the sea. The way light dashed itself upon the surface of the Bifrost Bridge, shattered into its seven colours (or twelve, according to Heimdall, twelve and two million more with his Eye).

  
Asgard, Sun of the Nine Realms, the first seed of Yggdrasil. A beautiful, densely petalled falsehood.

What do you do with such prosperity, a tiered lie, a gaudy citadel, embellished like a wedding pastry? You raze it to the ground.

( _I am Asgard_ , Hela had said.)

  
You raze the city to its foundations, the tombs that it stands upon. The dead are Asgard’s pedestal. Then, you destroy the foundations. Thrust a flaming sword into the heart of Asgard, let the whole complicated shell of a city crumble to cinder and ash.

Sigrid told her once, _do you ever feel that you’ve stolen someone’s luck? Because I have, I’m sure, there isn’t a time or place more perfect than this exact moment, and I feel like it isn’t mine._

And Brunnhilde replied as she pulled Sigrid close, “You’re dreaming. You think too much. And you get too pessimistic. That’s why you’ve never won against me.”  
There were more stars than usual that night, a strange jut of stars that seemed closer than the rest of the galaxy. And the light seemed heavy. And just briefly, Brunnhilde had felt infected by Sigrid’s fear, felt a restless pull and churn in her stomach. She silently blamed Sigrid for that fear.

  
Turns out, though, Sigrid had been right.

  
Towers crumbling to ash. Flames sweeping off the edge of Sutur’s sword, cleaving through the beautifully crafted thoroughfares, pulverising the layers of opulent architecture.  
The truth of Asgard is, in fact, a very simple thing. And Hela had been the only one to speak it. There once was no city, no Asgard. Then it was born, entire planets and realms were reshaped into the womb that birthed it, and it was a fiery and bloody birth.

  
Asgard doesn’t belong to Valkyrie, and she no longer knows it, not since she fell from Yggdrasil’s reach. Let Hela have Asgard.

 

* * *

 

“You know you want to do it. If not for me, then to inconvenience your brother,” says Valkyrie, joylessly.

“You are just as crude as him. Even worse -- you’re completely unoriginal. The two of you make a good pair.” Loki’s expression is condescending. “And I fail to see the point of this.”

“Unlike you, I have no pretences in being anything but crude and unoriginal,” she says, flatly. “Hurry up--I can hear Thor.”  
“Of course I’m not doing this.”

  
Laughter swells from one of the ship’s passageways, a thud, someone clapping someone else on the shoulder. Definitely Thor.

  
“Too late.” Valkyrie seizes Loki’s wrist, slings his arm around the back of her neck, dragging his weight down against her. Loki struggles, but she maintains her vice-like grip on him, taking advantage of his surprise. He’s easy to manage like that.

Just as Thor, the new All Father and incumbent ruler of Asgard, steps into sight, Valkyrie slides her other arm around Loki’s waist, picks him off the ground, and hurls him at his own brother. There is the thud of colliding bodies. Both Thor and Loki end up sprawled on the ground. Loki lets out a grunt of pain. His neck beneath Thor’s thigh.

“Get help,” she taunts Thor. “Your brother’s dying.”

Thor picks himself off the ground. How completely staggered he looked when he saw Loki hurtling toward him. Classic. She’ll remember that look. But his good humour doesn’t waver, and he’s beaming even as he rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck and wrists.

  
“You did it wrong,” he tells Valkyrie, “but nice try. Nobody has ever tossed my brother, except me, of course.”

  
“I am a Revenger after all.”

  
“I know a spell to turn you into something chitinous and easily squashed beneath the heel of a shoe,” Loki snarls, getting to his feet and trying to restore a shred of dignity.

  
Thor punches his arm lightly. “Come on, little brother. This is a revelation: our Valkyrie is finally out of the storage bay. And she has a sense of humour.”

  
Valkyrie can’t resist; she sways up to him and mischievously taps his nose with her finger. “You’re a sport.”

  
“You know,” says Thor, “I was actually looking for you. I found this.”

  
Only then does she notice what he’s holding: a crystal decanter, the glass faceted and fragmenting light into uneven shapes on the walls.

  
“Asgardian mead,” Loki says. “Wasted on your indiscriminate tastebuds.”

  
“So, what now?” she says. “We’re just going to sit down together and have a drink? Toast to the future, make promises to each other?”

  
“That sounds complicated,” says Thor. “How about just the drink?”

  
He uncorks the bottle and hands the whole thing to her. He sounds and looks so earnest. They don’t have any glasses. The aroma of the drink is sweet and heady. Liquid spice. The taste of endless summers. One swallow and your insides light up like a star.

  
She tries to say something, but any comeback she has is half-hearted.

After the fall from Yggdrasil, all Valkyrie expected was to survive, to keep stumbling through the days, selling scrap and slaves, buying her next drink. She’d long eschewed Asgard before it was destroyed. And she had got exactly what she’d expected. Until now.

Asgard no longer feels real. If Asgard is all burned up and smoked out, perhaps its ashes are now drifting out into space. Maybe the particles of her former home, like glittering scintilla, will end up down a wormhole, all the way down to Sakaar perhaps. Funny how Sakaar is the realest place she’s ever lived in. Sakaar with its million doorways, that liminal place between worlds, searing and thick-aired, dizzying with the reek of trash and lurid with the pixelated holographic effigies of the Grandmaster.

  
“Oh, come on. Let’s go outside.” Thor suddenly sweeps his arms around both Valkyrie and Loki and starts to jostle them out along a corridor.

  
She knows where they’re going – she can hear the clamour of people on the other sides of walls. Hulk’s angry-gentle gutturals. Korg’s softer and more reproachful voice. _Cleanliness, bro! Do your own dishes! So we can all coexist in peaceful and sanitary harmony, eh?_

  
They’ll run out of walls soon and she’ll be thrust into the heart of all the bustle, all the people she’s avoided so far. It’s a weird moment. It kind of jolts her out of herself, scoops her clean from the life she once lived, out of the expectation to just survive. And she and Loki are being walked along, beneath the firm bands of Thor’s arms, both of them protesting at being in such close proximity to the armpits of the King of Asgard. Loki is smiling with much reluctance, but it’s not fake, more like something difficult to restrain in this moment.

  
What a strange time for Valkyrie.

  
“Wait,” she says, “for a moment.”

  
Thor pauses.

  
She pops open the seal of the decanter of mead. And passes it to him.

  
He looks astonished. But he accepts. Drinks straight from the bottle, a long swallow. And he passes it to Loki, who makes a show of being forced to accept. Loki’s grimace is too perfect to be sincere.

  
There should be someone else for the bottle to go to. Someone else to take a swig, chug down a mouthful of mead from a scorched planet that never really meant anything to anyone. But Loki shoves the bottle toward her, pretty much jams it against her ribs. “Looks like it’s your turn.”

  
There’s just her, and the space around her, but only if she lets there be space. Loki is right.

  
“Sweet—as,” she starts to say, and then stops, and drinks deep.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not be on [tumblr](www.anagrammaddict.tumblr.com)


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